How I answer PHP questions on Stack Overflow

Am I overdoing it? Probably. Do I care? No.

I like to answer PHP questions on Stack Overflow. I've been doing it for a while and begun to notice some patterns of behaviour in the process of answering:

• Open 3v4l or similar online playground
• Copy and paste code from the question
• "un"var_dump, "un"print_r, json_decode or some other data transformation so it could actually be used
• Iterate and play around

Since I was getting bored of manually transcoding a var_dump or print_r statement, I searched online for some functions to automatically convert the output back to usable PHP arrays.

• unvar_dump: PHP reverse var_dump function
• print_r_reverse: PHP function to reverse print_r function

These two functions are bloody useful for answering PHP questions on Stack Overflow!

But I didn't stop there. Oh no, I had to go further.

I wanted a script that would do the following:

1. Take a Stack Overflow question page, extract the ID
2. Create a folder for the answer
3. Scrape the question page, dump into a file
4. Extract any codeblocks that are in the question and dump into separate files
5. Create a PHP file ready for me to edit with reference to the useful helper functions listed above
6. Navigate to the created folder and launch the PHP file

Here's a look at the basic workflow in action:

I've put it up at Github if you wanted to have a look at the code: mulquin/stackoverflow_helper